The sales process is a tricky one in any business. You want to keep the leads and quotes coming and going in the most consistent way possible, which is easier said than done. Some companies have a constant stream of leads, but some scrap around trying to get any enquiry they can. The difference is almost always marketing and, specifically, the busy companies often have the strongest offer that gets their audience in the buying mood right away.
So, how do you craft an irresistible offer that gets that phone ringing off the hook? Ultimately you need to choose your target market, identify their specific problem and then demonstrate you can solve it better than anyone else in a way that gets them to pick up the phone, fill out the form, or send that email. Let’s look at specifics on how to do this.
Don’t be lazy with your offer
The very first thing you need to know is that an “offer” isn’t simply a tagline that says something like “10% off”. This is a lazy offer that doesn’t work to help you stand out from the competition. Ultimately your offer needs to be clear, specific and revolved around your customer.
By offering 10% off, you’ve instantly got the potential customer looking to shop around on price as it doesn’t appeal to them directly. Your offer needs to get the customer emotionally wanting to spend money. If you tap into their emotions with your offer, your customer will justify the spend logically further down the line.
Now we’ve gone over what doesn’t work, let’s talk about what does.
Crafting your best offer - what is your best feature?
First things first, we need to create the meat of the offer. This is the thing that the customer is buying - very straightforward. But you still need to identify what this is. Quite simply constructing your offer around “landscaping services” isn’t powerful enough for the customer to connect to. You need to structure your offer around a problem the customer has with their garden. If the offer speaks to their problems, they are much likely to follow through.
Imagine your customers main problem is they are too busy with work, childcare and other commitments to keep on top of their garden, so it is always an embarrassing eye-sore and they are embarrassed to have guests as a result. The offer needs to speak to the solution to this problem.
The second element of an irresistible offer is that you need to know what you want to offer. What is your greatest product or service? What service can you complete in your sleep almost 100% of the time?
I’m sure something jumps out to you already, but ask yourself the following: if you only got paid based on delivering perfect results, what part of your service would you trust to get you paid? Are you a perfect installer of porcelain? Do you build eye-wateringly beautiful planting? Whatever it is, you need to have complete confidence that you can smash this out of the park every single time. This then becomes the heart of the offer: what is your customers main problem & how can you solve it effectively every single time. This is the value of your offer.
Example:
“Is your garden an eye-sore when compared to the rest of your home? Your life is probably busy with work, childcare and other commitments that a garden can quickly get over grown unusable and too embarrassing to show off. We specialise in creating ultra-low maintenance, luxury outdoor spaces that require as little as 1 hour per month to maintain, so you are always ready to show it off to guests.”
This connects us to the customer's problem, and we are offering to directly solve it. A great start.
The language you use needs to be the same as your customers
Once you’ve got the valuable part of your offer identified, you need to phrase it in a way that connects the most directly to your customer. You need to use the same language they use, helping them connect with the message.
This is why finding your target market is so important. Once you know who they are, it’s easier to determine the language they use and insert it into your offer.
By sticking to exclusively landscaping lingo, you don’t necessarily come across as impressive, it simply acts to confuse your audience and stop them from connecting to your offer. They don’t care whether you call them slabs, flags or tiles. They don’t need to know the difference between grouting, pointing and jointing. They are concerned with their concerns and they want to pay you to fix them. Sadly, your concerns don’t come into play!
Who are your main customers? What do they talk about? Make sure to only use language they will come across on a daily basis in your offer. Avoid landscaping specialist language, and try to include language you would expect them to speak.
Justify WHY you can make this offer
If your customer identifies with and loves your offer, they may begin to question regarding why your offer is so good. How are you able to offer what you are offering? Therefore it’s sometimes a good idea to justify why you are able to make this offer, within the offer itself.
You’d be surprised how many people will be put off by a fantastic sounding offer. Customers are fatigued with to-good-to-be-true offers and often instinctively reject anything that might sound too good to be true.
Let them know why you have lots of start dates available. If you’re really as good as your offer suggests, they may need a reason for why you can take their project on. This should be the truth - don’t lie about why you are offering what you are offering. Have you expanded your staff? Are you expanding across the country? Have you had a cancellation? It’s always a nice idea to justify your offering.
Can add more services to your offering for free - “Value-Stacking”
Another nice little tool you can use is to “value-stack”. This means adding more onto your offering rather than dipping the price. Can you add more value to make the price seem better, rather than tapping out and lowering the price? By lowering the price to get the deal, it’s likely to encourage them to shop around - which we don’t want! Making your offer more valuable is a great way to flip the script.
Can you offer a free return-and-seal? Can you leave them with a free maintenance kit when you leave? What can you add to make your offer seem like a slam-dunk bargain.
Once your customer has accepted, can you up-sell additional offerings?
Up-selling is a great way to increase the sale price once the customer has accepted the quote. It’s a good idea to have 2 or 3 products to then offer on top the project price to top it up a little.
Can you offer a 1-year guarantee on the grout? Or whatever the supplier offers? Can you offer a damage replacement warranty? A quarterly maintenance offering? Annual re-sealing of the patio?
Once the customer is in the buying mood, this is your opportunity to see if there are more services you can provide.
Should you provide your customers with a payment plan?
Spreading payments is another great way to prevent acting as a block to your customers. Sometimes £1,000s in a single lump sum can be a barrier between you and landing the job. Can you offer a payment plan which spreads the cost? It’s tricky to deal with in terms of admin, but it can be a great way to win more jobs and increase your income.
By offering to spread the payments, you can often ‘charge’ for spreading the cost. So 12 monthly payments of say £799 may actually equal more than you would have charged anyway. You can then also offer a potentially large discount for payment up front.
Making your offering completely risk-free - the guarantee
This is one of the trickier parts of your offer to get right. You want to try to eliminate any concerns that your customer might have as part of your offer. Any element of risk of going with your company needs to be completely eliminated - and a guarantee is a fantastic way to do this.
First, you need to find out what your customer is concerned about. Maybe you could even ask a few next time you are quoting: “What is your biggest concern about going with my company?”, you might learn some valuable stuff. Are they concerned about large constructional damage? Not getting their desired result? A completely ruined garden? Flood damage?
Depending on what they say, you need to work a guarantee that it won’t happen in your offer. You need to offer a CRAZY guarantee to eliminate any sense of risk that your customer may have in engaging with you. If they feel no risk, then they may well jump and accept the quote.
When deciding what sort of guarantee you can give, it might be worth checking your insurance documents cover, and then building this into your guarantee. Are you covered for £5million in damages? Tell your customer this as part of your guarantee. The idea of this element is for your offer to end up feeling risk-free.
Do you have a limited supply, or a limited amount of time?
If you book up quickly, that’s a really good place for your business to be in. When you are busy, you should treat this like a snowball. The busier you are, the more people you should have clamouring for your services. Scarcity of your service is a fantastic way to get customer to act quickly. If you are offering a service where you have a limited capacity to act, then you should drive this home in your offer.
Landscaping is a multi-faceted, in-demand skill and often books up very quickly. It might be a good idea to let your potential customers know that you are only taking 1 more booking before July, so act now. Etc.
What should your offer look like? Examples.
We’ve established that 10% off is a terrible offer, but in reality it’s what you are competing against. The better you can make your offer look in comparison to this, the more success you will find as a business. We’ve looked at each element of the offer in turn, but what exactly can we build this into?
- Value (the meat of the offer) - “Is your garden an eye-sore when compared to the rest of your home? Your life is probably busy with work, childcare and other commitments that a garden can quickly get over grown unusable and too embarrassing to show off. We specialise in creating ultra-low maintenance, luxury outdoor spaces that require as little as 1 hour per month to maintain, so you are always ready to show it off to guests.”
- Language (don’t be technical) - we’ll leave the balance sheets to you, you leave your garden makeover to us.
- Why (justify your offer) - we’ve recently expanded our teams, so we have a handful of start dates available.
- Value-stacking (add more elements to the offer) - free return and seal in 3 months, and a monthly maintenance kit so you garden always looks brand new.
- Upsell (do they want anything else) - when you’ve booked in, we can also offer a 1 year grout warranty, a product damage replacement warranty, an annual resealing as well as a quarterly maintenance package.
- Payment plan (reduce resistance by spreading payment) - with 12 easy payments of £799, you can spread the cost so your perfect garden is easier on your pocket.
- Guarantee (reduce risk): we guarantee our work to the finest craftsmanship standards. If any failures occur, you are guaranteed for up to £5million worth of damages. Your house could fall down 10 times over!
- Scarcity (act quickly): we only have 5 start dates available before September 2021, so if you want to get started, call us today.
The final offer - an example
Here’s our best attempt at a complete offer targeting local accountants who want an impressive garden. Their main issue is lack of time to maintain it:
"Is your garden an eye-sore when you compare it to the rest of your home? Your life is probably filled with work commitments, child-care commitments as well as any other social or domestic commitments, and working your garden is often the last thing on your list of jobs. It can quickly get overgrown and unusable and too embarrassing to show off; a garden can be the ultimate showpiece to your home, so don’t let maintenance be the reason you can’t have something impressive to show off. We specialise in creating ultra-low maintenance, luxury outdoor spaces that require as little as 1 hour per month of maintenance, so whenever the time comes, you are ready to show it off to your guests. We aren’t experts in balance sheets, or profit and loss statements, we’ll leave that to you. But what we are experts in is creating you an impressive space that will look amazing all year round, so leave that with us. Due to our rapid growth, we have recently expanded our workforce to include extra teams across the city, so we still have a handful of start dates available this spring.
Not only will we make over your garden, we will also throw in a 1 year grout warranty for your new patio, a free return-and-seal process in 3 months so that your patio always looks amazing and is protected for good. We will also leave you with a complete maintenance kit at the end of the job, so that your 1 hour a month of garden maintenance costs you nothing.
You can even split the payments across 12 months to make it easy on your bank balance. Our work is also fully guaranteed. We are covered for up to £5million in damages, so you are in completely safe, professional hands.
We have 5 start dates available before september 2021, so if you want to get your job done and enjoy some of the warm weather, call us today."
How much better than simply saying “10% off!”.
Conclusion - Take your time and get it right
Your offer is central to your marketing. It sets the direction, determines who your customers are and how they respond, and it can even determine the prices you can charge! It’s important to spend the time getting it right.
Our attempt above is the best we can come up with, and believe it or not, it took us hours and hours! This isn’t something that can just happen, it needs work. But the results will be significant. A clear offer, with emotional content, that solves a specific problem will speak more to any potential client than simply reducing the price. So stop leaving money on the table and get your marketing message right.
